Search results for ""Medieval Institute Publications""

Giovanni Villani's New Chronicle traces the history of Florence, Italy, and Europe over a vast sweep of time - from the destruction of the Tower of Babel to the outbreak of the Black Death. This final book, which covers one of the most dramatic periods of the early fourteenth century, is a narrative of transformation, of crisis, in which the author, like many of his contemporaries in the mid-fourteenth century, perceives the punishing hand of God. At the same time, this book, composed by Villani as events were unfolding, reveals - in its attention to detail, in its attempted impartiality, in its desire to make sense of events rather than simply document them - the glimmers of a new historical sensibility.

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British Library MS Harley 2253 is one of the most important literary works to survive from the English medieval era. In rarity, quality, and abundance, its secular love lyrics comprise an unrivaled collection. Intermingled with them are contemporary political songs as well as delicate lyrics designed to inspire religious devotion.

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One of the most engaging Middle English crusading poems, Richard Coer de Lyon recounts in verse the exploits, both historical and fanciful, of Richard I, king of England. While Richard's participation in the Third Crusade serves as its main subject, the poem disrupts its historical narrative with a number of fabulous interpolations, two of which are particularly notorious: the depiction of Richard's mother as a demon, and the portrayal of the king himself as a voracious cannibal. Once the source of critical disparagement, the poem's blending of history and fantasy—its historical distortions—have recently become the focus of renewed interest in the poem. With a substantial introduction and comprehensive explanatory and textual notes, this new edition of Richard Coer de Lyon signally contributes to the reappraisal and understanding of what became—during the centuries-long process of its composition—one of the most popular of medieval romances.

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As Hanks and Jesmok note in their introduction, "pursuing opponents and pursuing love move the Morte's narrative, but the work's richness comes from its romance and tragic elements: the human quest for maturity and fulfillment and those uncontrollable forces that undermine the quest and destroy the dream. Malory's use of myth and magic to explore these themes has received extensive scholarly attention, but his views on and thematic use of Christianity have long needed a closer look."

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Comparative Perspectives on History and Historians: Essays in Memory of Bryce Lyon (1920-2007) features a section of appreciations of Bryce Lyon from the three editors, R. C. Van Caenegem, and Walter Prevenier, followed by three sections on the major areas on which Lyon's research concentrated: the legacy of Henri Pirenne, constitutional and legal history of England and the Continent, and the economic history of the Low Countries. Original essays by Bernard S. Bachrach, David S. Bachrach, Jan Dumolyn, Caroline Dunn, Jelle Haemers, John H. A. Munro, James M. Murray, Anthony Musson, David Nicholas, W. Mark Ormrod, Walter Prevenier, Jeff Rider, Don C. Skemer, and Marci Sortor deepen our understanding of Lyon's career and significance and further our knowledge of the areas in which he worked.

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The Middle Ages provided an important, if complex, set of literary and historiographic models for early modern authors, although the early modern authors responded to the alien political, religious, and cultural landscape of medieval England through their more present ideological concerns. From Shakespeare's manipulation of his medieval source material to Protestant responses to medieval Catholicism, this collection of essays explores the ways that early modern English writers responded to the medieval English literary and historical record, dealing with topics such as historiographic bias, print history, intertextuality, and cultural history.

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Clifford Davidson's newly revised and expanded edition of A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge makes available the most significant text of dramatic criticism in Middle English. A polemic against the playing of "miraclis," the Tretise is frequently linked to the Wycliffite or Lollard movements of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. In an essay on the text's dialect, Paul A. Johnston, Jr. definitively identifies the Tretise as the work of two authors who lived in adjacent counties in the Midlands.

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John Lydgate is known as the most distinguished poet of fifteenth-century England. This volume presents his brilliant and underappreciated dramatic texts written for both private and public entertainment, encompassing both religious and secular topics. This is the first time since 1934 that many of these poems have been reprinted or reedited. They are published here with an extensive gloss and notes, as well as a glossary and an introduction, making them accessible to a new generation of students of the Middle Ages. These works are indispensible to any study of medieval English drama.

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Since its rediscovery by nineteenth-century scholarship, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 has never been ignored, though it has also not gained a great deal of notoriety beyond the scholars of Middle English romance. It is hoped that the present volume will encourage study of the entire manuscript as a valuable witness to the devotional habits, cultural values, and popular tastes of late medieval England.

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While the essays offered in this collection vary in subject, discipline, and methodological approach, they center on the interpretation of the material world, whether that materiality appears in literature, stone, or the artifacts removed from an archaeological dig. The essay deal mainly with the Germanic and Celtic worlds, but incorporate motifs from Eastern Christian and Roman cultures. Contributors address the themes of time in history; societal and ideological change and continuity; iconic style and polysemous textuality; symbolic and representational interpretation; gender-specific economic production; definitions of social and political structures; and social processes of eclecticism and adaptation. Hence the approaches are interdisciplinary, contextual, comparative, and fluid in their integration of texts and images where the text represented is as crucial to the meaning as is the image or object; they therefore represent the study of the material culture of the Anglo-Saxon period at its best. The variety of disciplines represented in the essays and the range of topics covered by the individual scholars give some indication of the enormous scope of the scholarship of Rosemary Cramp, in whose honor this volume was produced. Readers will find that the subjects dealt with resonate with each other in interesting and complex ways. It is an invaluable contribution to scholars of Anglo-Saxon culture and archaeology.

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The complete text of John Gower's poem is a three-volume edition, including all Latin components-with translations-of this bilingual text and extensive glosses, bibliography and explanatory notes. Volume 1 contains the Prologue and Books 1 and 8, in effect the overall structure of Gower's poem.

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The complete text of John Gower's Confessio Amantis is a 3-volume edition, including all Latin components - with translations - of this bilingual poem and extensive glosses, bibliography, and explanatory notes. Volume 3 contains Books 5, 6, and 7, which follow another kind of development as Gower shifts from romance banter and formulaic confession to philosophical inquiry.

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Scottish poet William Dunbar is usually considered one of the most important figures of fifteenth-century British literature, and may lay claim to being the finest lyric poet writing in English in the century and half between the death of Chaucer in 1400 and the appearance of Tottel's Miscellany in 1557. Dunbar's poems offer vivid depictions of late medieval Scottish society and serve up a striking pageant of colorful figures at the court of James IV (r. 1488-1513), with which he was associated for much of his adult life. The poems are remarkable both for their diversity and variability and for their multiplicity of voices, styles, and tones. The great variety of poems within Dunbar's canon includes religious hymns of exaltation, moral poems on a wide range of serious themes, comic and parodic poems of extreme salaciousness and scatological coarseness, general satires against the times, and satires with much more specific targets, often a single individual. This edition of eighty-four poems attributed to Dunbar includes extensive background material and explanatory notes that are sure to be of interest to students and Dunbar enthusiasts alike. The edition is rounded out with textual notes, an index of first lines, and a glossary.

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The poem that Richard Maidstone wrote on the metropolitan crisis of 1392 reports information about the royal entry that concluded the crisis in greater detail than any other source. The poem is not primarily a report, however; like Maidstone's other writings, it is above all an ideologically driven literary intervention, produced at a particular moment, addressing a particular political circumstance. Maidstone's Concordia shows Anglo-Latin poetry, on a specific occasion, in the process of making itself a public poetry a broadly appealing, flexible, legible medium for addressing public issues.

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John Capgrave's The Life of Saint Katherine, written c. 1463 in Lynn in Norfolk, is, according to the editor, . . . the longest and most intricate Katherine legend written during the Middle Ages, either in Latin or in any vernacular. In telling the story of the life of the virgin martyr, Katherine, Capgrave uses many of the tropes that mark the enormously popular genre of hagiography as it was written throughout the Middle Ages. Given his learning, however, and his evident acquaintance with the works of Chaucer, Lydgate, and Osburn Bokenham, and his knowledge of medieval drama, and the possibility that he knew of The Book of Margery Kempe, this saint's life should be particularly interesting to students of late Middle English culture, especially literature. In the course of his encyclopedic narrative, in which he evidently sought to appeal to a broad audience in sophisticated, if provincial, Norfolk, Capgrave inserts digressions on Greek and Roman history; on just and unjust rule and justifiable vs. unjustifiable rebellion; on child care; on medieval English feasts, jousts, and pageants; and on the role(s) of women.

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This collection of essays was the first published in North America that sought to describe the methodology and some results of a scholarly enterprise hailed in the preface to the volume as one of the most vibrant, innovative, and productive movements in medieval scholarship at the present time.Under the direction of Monique Bourin an international team of scholars has been considering onomastics from the perspective of history rather than that of linguistics or philology. By examining data on both the micro and macro levels, researchers are beginning to describe how medieval patterns of naming have implications for our understanding of family relationships, kinship, and larger social structures that were not fully realized by earlier scholars.

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Fitted with ample introductions, notes, and glosses, this volume will make an excellent text for a class of any level on Middle English romance. This excellent edition includes King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, and Athelston. These romances all deal with the Matter of Britain—that is, they celebrate action and adventure tales taking place in England. Featuring all the hallmarks of a good romance, these works include disinherited nobles, thrilling battles, love stories, dragons, and all sorts of marvels and adventures. Spanning the mid thirteenth to the late fourteenth century, these works provide an excellent cross section of the wonderful world of Middle English romances featuring the escapades of their fantastical countrymen.

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For all its spiritual cheerfulness and obvious importance as a tale to conclude tales, a last word from a notable maker of words, The Parson's Tale seems to have inspired sentence and solaas in remarkably few critics. This volume rejects the tradition that assumes the tale to be of questionable literary value. The studies included span the range of Parson's Tale criticism from the textual, to the philological, to the hermeneutical. What they share is the assumption that if one is to understand the role of The Parson's Tale, one must begin by accepting the language and method by which Chaucer fashioned it. This rethinking of traditional scholarship on this crucial aspect of The Canterbury Tales will be of great interest to Chaucer scholars and students of medieval literature.

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This anthology aims to add flesh to the bones and the supplements, reservations, and alternatives for a deeper understanding of the tradition of natural law throughout the medieval period. It runs contrary to the opinion so commonly held since the Renaissance, that any tradition deemed medieval has little or even nothing to offer to contemporary needs and interests. The essays contained herein put to bed such a notion with fresh and interesting takes on Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, natural law in the traditions of Golden Age Spain, and more.

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In a series of essays readers will find information about modern scholarship on the subject of chivalry and various suggestions for ways to teach some familiar and unfamiliar chivalric materials. Short bibliographies are provided for teachers' further use.

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The study of popular hymnody is remote not only from contemporary experience but also from very many contemporary scholars. A great deal of this remove stems from the complicated origins and history of this important genre. The Monophonic Lauda aims to present for the first time an English study of the form, as such a text has not been available before. This also necessitates an exploration of previous scholarship on the lauda, though the book is not devoted to this particular exercise. The volume is well illustrated, including musical notation and black-and-white plates.

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This illustrated volume intelligently provides a much-needed introduction to what may have been the most popular variety of drama in the Middle Ages: the saint play. A comprehensive and collaborative survey is provided with an emphasis on interdisciplinary study rather than only literary analysis. While the saint play in England is the connecting theme of the volume, the papers explore other topics necessary to fully understand the culture of the saint play, such as the genre as manifest on the continent, including plays in French, Italian, and German.

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Each of these diverse essays confronts important issues in the study of medieval art, literature, and drama. The topics covered include the symbolism of scatological illustration in Gothic manuscripts (Karl Wentersdorf), connections between word and picture in religious art (Roger Ellis), and the relationship perceived between divine and human creativity (R. W. Hanning), while Clifford Davidson provides an exploration in the phenomenology of space and time in medieval theater.

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Before he suddenly passed away, John W. Robinson was working on a manuscript that he saw as effecting a marriage between the dramatic and the theatrical, as he felt there was too large a divide between literary scholars and practitioners of the theater. In it, Robinson stated that his purpose it to expound as plays the New Testament plays of the Wakefield Master and some of the related York plays, including two by the York Realist. . . . hop[ing] to show that the meaning and effect of the Wakefield Master's and York Realist's plays will not appear unless they are approached with the understanding that they were performed, with some idea of how they were performed, and with some appreciation of what they meant to a medieval audience. That manuscript is presented here, a close study of eight plays and the elements Robinson considers essential to performance: playwright, sponsors, location, plot, script, players, and audience.

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This richly illustrated book surveys representations of the stage and acting from manuscript illuminations, stained glass, sculpture, woodcarving, wall paintings, and the woodcuts that appear in playbooks produced by the first English printers.

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Strife occurs everywhere among characters in The Canterbury Tales, in the stories as well as the links between them. Characters seem always ready to dispute, contradict, declaim, and contend about almost anything. A competitive spirit suffuses the work, from the tale-telling among pilgrims and the personal rivalries that develop on the pilgrimage to the conflicts, beguilings, and one-uppings that go on in the tales. By understanding the rivalries of the Canterbury world, we may then recognize why Chaucer so insists on the individuality of the characters he creates, why so many characters (rightly or wrongly) resist structures, and why they challenge or reject social dogmas, often overturning them. The essays that make up this collection offer several provocative interpretations of the rivalrous and rebellious spirits that inhabit the worlds of Chaucer's tales. The volume is intended for the dedicated teacher of Chaucer as well as for the specialist in medieval English studies. As Chaucer's poem displays the contestive spirit of human affairs, so the collective spirit of these essays reflects vigorous debate and multi-faceted challenge.

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Strife occurs everywhere among characters in The Canterbury Tales, in the stories as well as the links between them. Characters seem always ready to dispute, contradict, declaim, and contend about almost anything. A competitive spirit suffuses the work, from the tale-telling among pilgrims and the personal rivalries that develop on the pilgrimage to the conflicts, beguilings, and one-uppings that go on in the tales. By understanding the rivalries of the Canterbury world, we may then recognize why Chaucer so insists on the individuality of the characters he creates, why so many characters (rightly or wrongly) resist structures, and why they challenge or reject social dogmas, often overturning them. The essays that make up this collection offer several provocative interpretations of the rivalrous and rebellious spirits that inhabit the worlds of Chaucer’s tales. The volume is intended for the dedicated teacher of Chaucer as well as for the specialist in medieval English studies. As Chaucer’s poem displays the contestive spirit of human affairs, so the collective spirit of these essays reflects vigorous debate and multi-faceted challenge.

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In his foreword to the volume, Clifford Davidson praises Guilfoyle's application of the concept of scenic form in her study of Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, and her exposition of Shakespeare's historical consciousness, noting her sensitive examination of the shape of the playwright's scenes when placed against traditional visual configurations and related textual resonances. Any student of Shakespeare will benefit from the nuanced study of his imagery and how it helps to color his characters and the action in his plays.

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Included here are the texts, translations, musical transcriptions, and facsimiles of the Swedish music-dramas for Holy Week and Easter: Depositio, Elevatio, and Visitatio Sepulchri.

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This work-a parallel-text edition that contains all four versions of Piers Plowman-constitutes a major enterprise of textual scholarship and will provide for students of Langland a modern equivalent to Skeat's standard edition of 1886. This revised and corrected three-volume set is specifically designed to facilitate study of the parallel text (Volume 1) alongside both the textual notes (Volume 2, part 1) and the commentary/glossary (Volume 2, part 2), and is intended to make the entire edition available to as many students of Langland as possible.

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The abbreviated Psalms commentary by Honorius Augustodunensis (ca. 1070 - ca. 1140)-a redaction of his own, much larger commentary on the entire Psalter-participates in a long tradition of Christian interpretation of the Book of Psalms. A prolific author closely associated with Anselm of Canterbury, Rupert of Deutz, and Gilbert of Poitiers, Honorius wrote a massive commentary on the Psalms when the so-called "school of Laon" was at work on the Glossa ordinaria. Honorius's work shares the academic interest of that school, while simultaneously serving the devotion of the Benedictine Reform. His Exposition of Selected Psalms highlights a tripartite division of the Psalter, even as it discovers in the psalms an apocalypticism fitting to the Church in its last age.

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One of the most compelling and provocative books of twelfth-century England, the Markyate Psalter was probably produced at St. Albans Abbey between 1120 and 1140. Heralded as a high point of English Romanesque illumination, the manuscript contains the Chanson de St. Alexis. Leading scholars of twelfth-century manuscript studies explore the Psalter, understanding it through new methodologies, pursuing innovative lines of inquiry. The collection shines fresh light on a well-known manuscript, and broadens the discourse about the book and its readers.

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At the end of the fifteenth century, Gavin Douglas devised his ambitious dream vision The Palyce of Honour in part to signal a new scope to Scottish literary culture. While deeply versed in Chaucer's writings, Douglas identified Ovid's Metamorphoses as a particularly timely model in the light of contemporary humanist scholarship. For all its comedy, The Palyce of Honour stands as a reminder to James IV of Scotland that poetry casts a powerful light upon the arts of rule. A new edition of David Parkinson’s 1992 book The Palis of Honoure. Medieval Institute Publications at Western Michigan University publishes the TEAMS Middle English Texts series, which is designed to make available texts that occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but have not been readily obtainable in student editions. The focus of Middle English Texts is on Middle English literature adjacent to such major authors as Chaucer or Malory. The editions include glosses of difficult words and short introductions on the history of the work, its merits, points of topical interest and brief bibliographies.

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Three lectures, initially presented before the University of Cambridge and now collected here, examine Matthew Parker as a noted collector of books, an avid annotator, and a keen student of Old English. In these lectures Dr. Page assesses the evidence for Parker's use of his manuscripts and printed books by drawing upon varied sources, including Parker's very numerous annotations upon their pages, and surveys the archbishop's role in the early-modern rediscovery and recovery of Old English and other medieval sources. Plates accompany the text to illustrate many characteristic aspects of Parker's interventions in his books.

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Beginning in 1987, the yearbook was the preeminent venue for scholarship on "Piers Plowman"; on related poems in the tradition of didactic alliterative verse and on the historical, religious, and intellectual contexts in which such poems were produced in late medieval England. Each volume contains essays, reviews and an annotated bibliography.

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In a series of essays readers will find information about modern scholarship on the subject of chivalry and various suggestions for ways to teach some familiar and unfamiliar chivalric materials. Short bibliographies are provided for teachers' further use.

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The disparate texts in this anthology, produced in England between the late thirteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, challenge, and in some cases parody and satirize, the institution of marriage. In so doing, according to the Introduction, they allow us to interrogate the traditional assumptions that shape the idea of the medieval household. The trials of marriage seem to outweigh its joys at times and, as some of these texts suggest, maintaining a sense of humor in the face of what must have been great difficulty could have been no easy task. The texts bridge generic categories. Some are obscure, written by anonymous authors; others are familiar, written by the likes of John Lydgate, John Wyclif, and William Dunbar. Taken together they suggest that, despite the fact that marriage had become a sacrament in the twelfth century and was increasingly recognized by ecclesiastical and secular authorities as a valuable social institution, it was not always a stabilizing and orderly social force.

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Although it seemed in the mid-1970s that the study of the troubadours and of Occitan literature had reached a sort of zenith, it has since become apparent that this moment was merely a plateau from which an intensive renewal was being launched. In this new bibliographic guide to Occitan and troubadour literature, Robert Taylor provides a definitive survey of the field of Occitan literary studies - from the earliest enigmatic texts to the fifteenth-century works of Occitano-Catalan poet Jordi de Sant Jordi - and treats over two thousand recent books and articles with full annotations. Taylor includes articles on related topics such as practical approaches to the language of the troubadours and the musicology of select troubadour songs, as well as articles situated within sociology, religious history, critical methodology, and psychoanalytical analysis. Each listing offers descriptive comments on the scholarly contribution of each source to Occitan literature, with remarks on striking or controversial content, and numerous cross-references that identify complementary studies and differing opinions. Taylor's painstaking attention to detail and broad knowledge of the field ensure that this guide will become the essential source for Occitan literary studies worldwide.

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In this new edition of the poems of Robert Henryson, David Parkinson offers editions of Henryson's "Fables," "The Testament of Cresseid," "Orpheus and Eurydice" and twelve shorter poems, grouped according to the strength of their attribution to Henryson, as well as the glosses and explanatory and textual notes characteristic of Middle English Texts Series volumes. Henryson was a prominent Scottish poet writing in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. This edition serves as an excellent addition to the Scots language and late medieval Scottish poetry.

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The first of two volumes dedicated to the memory of Paul Remy and having as theme the scientific domain to which he had dedicated his research for nearly forty years: the Occitan literature and language.

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The Play of Daniel from Beauvais was the first medieval music-drama to be staged in a popular modern production by the legendary Noah Greenberg's New York Pro Musica. This book provides for the first time a critical introduction to the staging and production, music, and setting of the play in its architectural and historical context. It also reproduces the pages in the manuscript which contain the play in facsimile, and it provides a new and faithful transcription of the music as well as a fresh translation of the text by A. Marcel J. Zijlstra of the Schola Cantorum "Quem Quaeritis" of the Netherlands, a group which performs regularly at the Utrecht Festival.

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Translation and the Transmission of Culture between 1300 and 1600 is a companion volume to Medieval Translators and their Craft (1989) and, like Medieval Translators, its aim is to provide the modern reader with a deeper understanding of the early centuries of translation in France. This collection works from the premise that translation never was, and should not now be, envisaged as a genre. Translatio was and continues to be infinitely variable, generating a correspondingly variable range of products from imitatively creative poetry to treatises of science. In the exercise of its multi-faceted set of practices the same controversies occurred then as now: creation or replication? Literality or freedom? Obligation to source or obligation to public? For this reason, the editors avoided periodization, but the volume makes no pretense at temporal exhaustiveness-the subject of translation is too vast. The contributors do, however, aim to shed light on several aspects of translation that have hitherto been neglected and that, despite the earliness of the period, have relevance to our understanding of translation whether in France or generally. Like its companion, this collection will be of interest to scholars of translation, textual studies, and medieval transmission of texts.

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The material contained here derives from a wide variety of printed and manuscript sources, chosen to give some idea of the rich diversity of evidence available to the historian of English medicine and its place in society during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries. Latin and French have been translated into modern English, while vernacular texts have been slightly modified, and obsolete or difficult words explained. Middle English has otherwise been retained to give the past an authentic voice and to emphasize the similarities as well as the differences between the experience of modern readers and that of the inhabitants of late medieval England

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Studies of late medieval Tuscany have traditionally relied on historiographical premises derived from the experience of its intensely investigated capital city. Specifically, normative and quantitative data from Florentine sources have been employed to chart demographic, social, and economic trends during the communal age and across the period of the Black Death and its aftermath. The results have invited instructive comparisons with other regions of Italy, as well as other parts of Europe. At the same time, however, the focus on Florence in its role as a metropolitan center belies the conceptual problems inherent in the modern definition of “region,” applicable only with hindsight to medieval juridical and topographical boundaries. The essays in this volume offer non-Italian scholars a representative sample of current European research and a summary of recent debates regarding the historical evolution of those republics that posed the most formidable obstacles to the extension of Florentine hegemony. While they cover a range of topics, they all provide evidence of the important resources available to scholars working in provincial Tuscan archives and the volume offers an excellent sampling of the state of scholarship on these Italian communities.

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This collection of essays was released in honor of John Leyerle, a scholar to whom all medievalists in North America, and many beyond, owe a great debt. As a teacher, scholar, and administrator, Leyerle has been a leader in the rise and renewal of medieval studies on this continent in the past thirty years. The essays in this volume encompass his broad academic interests and interdisciplinary approach to scholarship, with a range of contributors from Canada, the United States, and abroad.

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Eighteen essays by some of the most prominent British and North American students of heroic poetry, plus two poems and a bibliography, are gathered here to honor Jess B. Bessinger Jr., whose innovative studies of heroic poetry have instructed a generation of scholars and whose performances of Anglo-Saxon poems are legendary.

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